What are the characteristics of low ram?

[Imabigmac]

Okay so I'm at an interesting stage in the "8GB is enough" argument. In a few games I end up seeing ram usage at about 7.50GB. Yes I have chrome and other apps open but that is how I game. Anyway I don't want to waste my money on more ram but I will get more if I need too - if the game isn't being affected not much point.

 

On to the question; The only experience I have had with "low ram" was either with games failing to start or crashing after being super laggy. Is this all that will happen?  Or are there worse things that can occur like mega drops in game performance, or complete PC crashes?  Or is more subtle problem like slower loading or maybe a few fps?  

 

I lack a little bit of knowledge when it comes to ram so if you can help that is awesome. 

[Zweihander]

8GB is suggested for gaming, but 16GB would be recommended for further use such as rendering / video editing.

 

It doesn't hurt to get more, but how much you'll actually use depends on your needs.

[andre82693]

what games do you play

[Imabigmac]

what games do you play

The only two so far that I seen high usage are BF4 and company of heroes. - both of which I play a lot of. BF4 is my main game you could say. 

[BananaNinja]

When RAM  is filled up, the computer will then start reading and writing from the primary hard disk, this is to prevent total system crash, the problem is that hard disks are a lot slower than DRAM and hence everything in the process of the application will slow down.

So let's say it is faster to put pencils into a pencil case than a pencil holder, but if the pencil case is full, then you would have to spend more time putting individual pencils into a pencil holder, same thing for RAM, once it is full, it uses the hard disk where read and writes are slower causing the process to be slower resulting in Low FPS, Low responsiveness, lag and such.

[andre82693]

When RAM  is filled up, the computer will then start reading and writing from the primary hard disk, this is to prevent total system crash, the problem is that hard disks are a lot slower than DRAM and hence everything in the process of the application will slow down.

So let's say it is faster to put pencils into a pencil case than a pencil holder, but if the pencil case is full, then you would have to spend more time putting individual pencils into a pencil holder, same thing for RAM, once it is full, it uses the hard disk where read and writes are slower causing the process to be slower resulting in Low FPS, Low responsiveness, lag and such.

 

good point

[andre82693]

too me you should  get 16gb

[Imabigmac]

too me get 16gb

what?

[Schiavetto]

What happens when you run out of RAM is, your OS will start dumping your RAM content into the system storage (generally the HDD or SSD the OS is installed), modern OSs do a reasonably good job at clearing iddle contents out of memory so it's harder to fill it to the point there's nothing that can be paged, but if you push it too hard what you'll likely experience is unresponsiveness, freezes or crashes altogether.

[ForsakenLive]

Depends on the user, and you don't have to be a video editor to want more ram.

For a big gaming multitasker 8GB is never enough, and if you are doing work as well, it's going to get more obvious.

Personally I find myself gaming and doing some multi-tasking while running VMs, I'm not an editor or image designer and I yet enounter myself needing those 16GB.

 

Really it's up to you; if you find yourself occasionally hitting that 7.5+GB load you are the one that has to decide if you need more RAM available to don't get slowed down or if you are really just an inefficient user that doesn't want to learn to close those damn google search results tabs after finding it's way to a website.

[Imabigmac]

Depends on the user, and you don't have to be a video editor to want more ram.

For a big gaming multitasker 8GB is never enough, and if you are doing work as well, it's going to get more obvious.

Personally I find myself gaming and doing some multi-tasking while running VMs, I'm not an editor or image designer and I yet enounter myself needing those 16GB.

 

Really it's up to you; if you find yourself occasionally hitting that 7.5+GB load you are the one that has to decide if you need more RAM available to don't get slowed down or if you are really just an inefficient user that doesn't want to learn to close those damn google search results tabs after finding it's way to a website.

Well, and this where I have hard now. I rarely have more than 6 tabs open in chrome but, spotify, TS and then a big game like BF4 like to eat it up. But taht is all there is happening, its not lik eim trying to edit in teh background and so it becomes hard if the from responses im not experiencing "ram troubles" while strictly gaming. 

 

Any way hanks for the input.